SSH tricks

SSH (secure shell) is a program enabling secure access to remote filesystems. Not everyone is aware of other powerful SSH capabilities, such as passwordless login, automatic execution of commands on a remote system or even mounting a remote folder using SSH! In this article we’ll cover these features and much more.

SSH works in a client-server mode. It means that there must be an SSH daemon running on the server we want to connect to from our workstation. The SSH server is usually installed by default in modern Linux distributions. The server is started with a command like /etc/init.d/ssh start. It uses the communication port 22 by default, so if we have an active firewall, the port needs to be opened. After installing and starting the SSH server, we should be able to access it remotely. A simple command to log in as user1 to the remote_server (identified by a domain name or an IP address) looks like this: